Katelyn Regenscheid and Evan Davis after the completion of the ‘Beer and Life’ mission to explore every craft brewery in Minnesota

During her quest to visit every craft brewery in Minnesota, Katelyn Regenscheid turned to camping as a way to cut hotel costs during long travels. She recalls pulling into a state park outside Cuyuna one night, and setting a tent up in the middle of an open field.

Regenscheid remembers that night very well.

“There was an enormous thunderstorm,” she says. “Our tent was shaking, lightning all night. I maybe slept three hours. I saw a woman in the bathroom the next morning, and she said ‘I was going to ask you if you wanted to sleep in the RV with us.’ We were the only tent out there.”

Her boyfriend, Evan Davis, was with her that night. His recollection of the ordeal is … not quite as vivid.

“I think I had some whiskey beforehand, so I slept through the whole thing,” he says. “I didn’t even hear there was a storm until the next day.”

Regenscheid’s blog,Beer and Life, documented her journey from start to finish. The word “finish” can be read exactly as it’s defined: she has visited all 143 active breweries in Minnesota over a span of roughly two years, collecting life tips along the way.

The original plan was to finish around February 1 of this year, says Regenscheid, a 24-year-old Anoka native – but she apparently had enough cramming power left over from college to finish before Christmas. The holiday season saw her dash out for quick stops in Jordan, Pine City, Waseca, Mound, and Grand Rapids. She was in the northwestern corner of the state one weekend, then went to the southeastern corner of the state six days later.

The journey ended December 17, at Hoops Brewing in Duluth.

“I was planning out the maps and looking at weekends that I could go, [and] most of my last ones were going to be big road trips,” she says. “I realized I could potentially squeeze it in before Christmas, which would be a nice thing to do, finish 2017 with a nice closure.”

Her northwestern trip involved stops in Hallock, Fargo-Moorhead, Crosslake, and Little Falls. That’s over 800 miles, according to Google Maps, and was her longest trip for the blog. But not by far: a summer trip involved stops in Bemidji, Walker, Rainer, Ely, and Moose Lake. That trip was “only” 763 miles, but took five days and drew a circle around roughly a quarter of the state’s total area.

“When I started, it was pretty easy to knock out my first few dozen posts in the metro area,” she says. “but it required lots of juggling and strategic scheduling to hit other breweries. Not every brewery is open daily, and many have pretty limited hours. Finding a way to hit the far-away breweries without making too many six-hour drives was tough, but I filled up a notebook with potential schedules and made it work.”

RELATED:In the video below, Katelyn sings a Taylor Swift song with a mouth full of cheeseburger. We’re using “related” very loosely here.

The first video from last week's Mouth Full Karaoke is up! Here's Katelyn Regenscheid beefing up with a double-cheese from Pappy's Chicago Style Eatery and jamming out to Taylor Swift. You can hear the whole episode at http://minnesotaskinny.com/2017/02/10/podcast-episode-22-beef-love-beer-life-craftapped/

The start of the project came not long after Regenscheid graduated with her English and Psychology degrees from St. Olaf in 2015. The real world closed in quickly – or at least it tried.

“I realized that the world is a depressing capitalist place where you sell your soul to your job, and there’s nothing else you really have to do,” she says. “You can go home and you can just stay there. I needed a personal project to make me feel like a part of the grown-up world.”

The idea for Beer and Life spawned from a previous job she held as a social media manager, and the number of people she met working with brewery representatives. She says she wanted to learn how people cultivated that lifestyle. She says it all took shape one Wednesday night after work. She bought the domain, bought a website theme, and informed Davis he’d be sober-driving significantly more often.

“Kind of like a three-year-old with no impulse control,” she says, “once I had this idea, I ran with it.”

She recalls apprehensively approaching a bartender at LynLake Brewery on the first night, and saying something about this blog she was kind of doing but hadn’t really done yet. The bartender was perfectly friendly about it, she says, and adds that she had been met with very little resistance since.

It would seem a curious time to step away from the craft beer community, and Regenscheid has no plans to do so. For one, she took a job as the marketing manager for Minneapolis-based Inbound BrewCo. She’ll keep visiting new breweries as they open, and she’s hoping to parlay the work she’s done with the blog into publication of a book someday. For some reason, she’d like to camp some more.

When asked to take all the advice she received and put it into one piece of advice, she offered “Seek your own happiness.”

“It’s definitely about a journey, finding something you love to do, and respecting others’ happiness,” she says. “The world can be great if you want it to be, and let other people find that for themselves.”

You’ve got yourself a glass of Gravity Well. Excellent! You get a good whiff, eyes closed, slowly tilting your head back like someone who’s really sniffing a drink. Smell good? Good. You take a deliberate sip. It’s silky smooth, and warms the soul. You exclaim your choice of curse word or deity name, and say “That’s delicious!” You wonder about the barrel this beer had been aging in, where it came from, who its previous employer was.

You ask around, but either they don’t know or won’t tell you. What’s up with that?

At Minneapolis’ Insight Brewing, co-founder Ilan Klages-Mundt explained that some barrels must work their magic anonymously.

“Sometimes you get a distillery that will sell you a barrel, and they don’t want their name on it,” says Klages-Mundt. “People are a little careful to put their brand on something. Most direct distilleries usually do that, unless you ask specifically.”

Rum barrels and bourbon barrels have been aging Insight’s mighty imperial stout, Gravity Well, in preparation of Insight’s anniversary party this weekend – but their names cannot be revealed.

“If you don’t have prior consent, it’s actually illegal to claim that you used that producer’s barrel,” says Insight head brewer Matt Anhalt. “You can’t espouse it publicly.”

Insight Brewing head brewer Matt Anhalt explains that Gravity Well will age in barrels starting with next year’s batch, but this year’s was aged in METAL!

Bottles of this year’s Gravity Well go on sale at 2 p.m. Saturday at the taproom. Five variations were bottled this year, and 2,900 bottles are up for sale total. Of that, 28 cases are being shipped to select retailers.

“It’s still a very small amount, but we wanted to give the opportunity to some of our key accounts to be able to sell Gravity Well this year,” says Klages-Mundt.

Who’s ready to finally try a rum barrel-aged Gravity Well? You are! And it’s here! It’s the Gravity Well experience you’ve come to know and love, but with a little more yo-ho-ho. It’s got a hint sweetness. It’s nice and boozy. It’s enough to arouse the rum-lover, but even those who aren’t so receptive to that spirit – Klages-Mundt himself admitted he’s not – will have no problem appreciating Gravity Well in this form.

“It’s all about the end product. If you can get a tequila barrel-aged beer, it doesn’t mean you have to like tequila shots,” says Klages-Mundt. “There are a lot of spirit barrels out there, and we want to try them all.”

But who doesn’t like tequila shots?

The bourbon-lover in the family (hopefully that’s you) can have it two ways: bourbon barrel-aged and double bourbon barrel-aged. The bourbon barrel-aged model is a single-source batch, aged in barrels from A Bourbon-Maker Who Cannot Be Named. The double bourbon contains beer from that same batch, blended with a batch aged in Wyoming Whiskey barrels, then aged in Bulleit Rye barrels. Still with me?

Maybe it’s because I knew bourbon was in it, and I just always get happy from bourbon, but these variations made me really, really happy. At your family holiday dinner, bringing these will make you a hero among the few relatives you actually like and are willing to share them with. Enjoy them with a nice cigar; or, if you’re hiding and don’t want to give your location away, perhaps a thick stick of jerky.

The breakdown of bottle quantities goes like this: 700 original, 700 rum barrel, 700 bourbon and 700 double bourbon … and 100 of an extra-special Madagascar vanilla bean double-barrel. The Madagascar vanilla bean does have a purchase limit, one per person.

Not for nothing, Klages-Mundt said he will camp out at the brewery Friday night if anyone else does! The Weather Channel is forecasting a low of 18 degrees Friday night, with a high of 32 Saturday. If the beer isn’t incentive enough, just think of all the “urban camping” cred you’ll accrue.

Insight Brewing co-founder Ilan Klages-Mundt explains that 700 bottles of each core Gravity Well go on sale Saturday at the taproom, and if you don’t put that controller down and take out the garbage right now dammit …

They say the bigger the body, the deeper the gravity well. It makes sense, then, that this 12-percent ABV slobberknocker is getting whipped up at a brewery that opened with space to fit 40,000-barrel production. While Klages-Mundt was part of a four-person team (including Kevin Hilliard, Brian Berge, and Eric Schmidt) responsible for Insight’s launch as a business, the inspiration for the brewery came from his travels.

As for Insight’s barrel program, 150 barrels presently inhabit the brewhouse. This figures to reach 200 next year; and, with the acquisition of a new storage space, it could swell to 400.

Starting next year, even the original Gravity Well will be aged in barrels. Klages-Mundt says it will be aged in barrels used for previous vintages. He calls it “a nice, romantic tie-in to previous vintages,” and adds, “We will garner slight characteristics from prior vintages, but with more of a subtle barrel characteristic compared to the other versions.”

Every vintage of Gravity Well is aged a year, which means the first year’s batch was produced not long after Insight opened for business.

“Doing this so early after opening was tough on us, as we were fresh to the scene with few resources,” says Klages-Mundt, “so it really was a gamble whether the decision was a good one or not. When we released the beer a year later, we knew we had something special.”

The festivities kick off at the Insight Brewing taproom Saturday at 2 p.m. The Dead Pigeons kick off the music at 2:45 p.m., and the tunes go until midnight. Red Cow, Glam Doll Donuts, and others will provide food. Wristbands for those 21 and over are $2.